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Kusto is a service for storing and running interactive analytics over Big Data. Kusto was designed from scratch to be a “big data” repository for Azure and easy to query using Kusto Query Language (KQL). As we progress in our migration to the cloud, we learn new ways to monitor and alert resources and services. Microsoft has consolidated many services under the umbrella of ‘Azure Monitor.’ Whether you are detecting and diagnose issues across applications and dependencies,’ ‘correlate infrastructure issues with Azure Monitor for VMs,’ ‘drill into your SQL database monitoring data with Log Analytics, you will be using ‘Azure Monitor.’ Azure Monitor uses a version of the KQL used by Azure Data Explorer that is suitable for simple log queries and includes advanced functionality such as aggregations, joins, and intelligent analytics. As we advance, the KQL must be your primary resource for querying the Azure Monitor log.

This 95% demo session will show you some ‘getting started’ tips and a few sophisticated queries using KQL. I will do a live demo, generating an alert using KQL. I will dive into Kqlmagic, which brings you the benefit of notebooks, data analysis, and rich Python capabilities in the same location against Azure Log Analytics workspace. At the end of this session, beginners will have a solid knowledge about KQL that they can build upon by themselves; others will also learn many advanced operators, including machine learning ones. Come and learn about the future of monitoring and investigations of Azure services.

Speaker:
Taiob Ali, Microsoft MVP – Data Platform
Taiob Ali, Microsoft Data Platform MVP, is an accomplished technical leader with a proven record of success. During his last 15 years, he has worked with the Microsoft Data Platform and MongoDB both on-premises and cloud. His experience includes all three major business sectors: finance, e-commerce, and healthcare. Taiob has hands-on experience in managing large database projects, including massive data migration, intricate process design, testing and deployment, performance tuning, long term capacity planning.

Taiob is currently working at “GMO LLC” as Database Solutions Manager, focusing on cloud migration, automation, improving, and streamlining operational workflow. He is a regular speaker at local and virtual chapters, Data Saturdays, and Azure conferences. He is a board member of New England SQL Server User Group, founder of ‘Database Professionals Virtual Meetup Group’, and organizer of Boston Data Saturday.

Businesses are quickly moving to NoSQL databases to power their modern applications. Reason is that they are looking for a way to host a relatively unmodified RDBMS schema on a NoSQL database, then optimize it over time.

This presentation will show DBAs and SQL developers how to achieve the benefits of NoSQL within their environments. You’ll learn how to migrate a table-based data model to JSON documents, tweak your queries for relational JSON data, and create indexes to support fast query performance moreover the risk involved when using NoSQL.

Speaker:
Jean Joseph is a Data Engineer, highly experienced in Traditional Database, and Big Data technologies with a history of successes in designing, implementing complex technical projects for diverse businesses in various stages of their development. Acknowledged as a leader capable of mentoring teams of different backgrounds and talents and inspiring individual efforts to deliver.

Speaker Blog: https://bigdatadriven.org/

Microsoft Docs are open source on Github! Join the SQL-Docs content team for a discussion on modern Microsoft documentation (regardless of technology). Learn about the content publishing engines behind Docs, and the best ways to add your content and fixes to Docs that are read by the entire customer community. There are hundreds of thousands of GitHub issues and PR’s submitted to Docs every month, how can you be an effective part of that process and get your face on the top of an article?

Presenter: MSFT SQL-Docs team (panelist headcount TBD)

Bio: Members of the Microsoft SQL-Docs team will present this thorough walkthrough on how you can contribute and be recognized as a SQL Docs contributor. Presentation lead is William Assaf (@william_a_dba), a senior content developer on the SQL-Docs team. Formerly a Data Platform MVP and a consultant, William currently works with Microsoft product groups on content related to Microsoft SQL offerings, specifically over SQL performance, and Azure SQL DB, Big Data Clusters, and Azure Synapse.

In this session you will get fundamentals of Azure SQL PaaS (Platform as a Service) options from DBA perspective. I will go over Azure SQL DB and Managed Instance options first and then describe what are the differences between the two and why would you choose one over the other. Azure SQL is a very mature Microsoft product and can handle enterprise level SQL Server workload while providing security, high availability and performance for your data. I will also explain the main differences in supporting databases on-premises versus Azure SQL to alleviate your fears if you have one that is what is blocking you from adopting Azure SQL. If you are a DBA or your organization is considering moving to Azure Cloud, this session is for you.

Speaker:
Ameena Lalani is a SQL Server veteran and started her journey with SQL Server 2000. She works at Microsoft as a Customer Engineer. She has implemented numerous High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions at various companies. Ameena imparts high quality training to her customers. She is a Microsoft Certified Trainer. She holds other certifications; Azure Associate Administrator and MCSA on SQL Server 2016 Database Administration. She is a co-leader of the Chicago Suburban SQL User Group. Ameena volunteers and speaks about SQL Server and Azure SQL at various community events throughout the United States.

Many companies believe administering a SQL Server in the cloud is the same as administering a SQL Server on premises and that is a big mistake.

Optimizing, Monitoring, Security, there are many differences on the administration you will learn during this session, allowing you to become a better cloud DBA.

SPEAKER
Dennes Torres, Software Developer Ascent Software
Dennes Torres is a Data Platform MVP with more than 25 years of experience in the IT area. He improves Data Platform Architectures and turns data into knowledge. As a Brazilian living in Malta, Dennes works as a software developer and leads the Malta MDP User Group. Having the MCSE Data Platform, Business Intelligence, and Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) certifications, Dennes has been in love with database servers since he was introduced to SQL Server 6.5, more years ago than he would like to admit.

* Please note that this presentation is approximately 75 minutes long *

The basic mechanism when we want to give users access to data or actions in SQL Server in a controlled way through stored procedure is ownership chaining. This is something we use every day as SQL workers, although we may not be aware of it. Every once in a while, we run into situations where it seems that it is not sufficient to put a statement in a stored procedure, but that users need to be granted explicit permissions – something we may not always be comfortable with, because that would permit the users to do things we do not want them to be able to.

There are two additional mechanisms in SQL Server we can employ in these situations: certificate signing and the EXECUTE AS clause. In this session I will start by exploring how ownership chaining works and its limitations. I will then proceed to explore the other two options and I will particularly focus on certificate signing, as this is the preferred method. At first it may seem overly complex, but I will show how it easily can be automated. EXECUTE AS may seem simpler, but I will point out potential problems with it, not the least if you try to use it on server level and consider to set the database as TRUSTWORTHY. This session is directed towards both developers and DBAs, as this session deals with problems you may face in either roles.

SPEAKER
Erland Sommarskog, Consultant Erland Sommarskog SQL Konsult AB
Erland Sommarskog is an independent consultant based in Stockholm, working with SQL Server since 1991. He was first awarded SQL Server MVP in 2001, and has been re-awarded every year since. His focus is on systems development with the SQL Server Database Engine and his passion is to help people to write better SQL Server applications.

In this session you will learn the best practices, tips and tricks on how to successfully use Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance on production environments and how the DBA job changed versus OnPremise. You will learn how to monitor and improve Azure SQL Database query performance. It will cover how using Query Store, Extended Events, DMVs to help for our monitoring and improve query response times when running their databases in the Microsoft Azure cloud. These learnings are fruit of Microsoft CSS support cases, and customer field engagements. This session includes several demos

Speaker:
Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz, Escalation Engineer Microsoft

José Manuel Jurado currently works as SQL Escalation Engineer and Subject Matter Expert in Azure SQL Database at Microsoft Spain. With over 20+ years of experience in SQL Server environments (administration and database development), he is a speaker for internal events at Microsoft and for public events such as SQLSaturday, SQL Nexus, SQLBits, Pass Summit, SQL Server Konferenze, TechReady, DotNetConference, and Azure BootCamp. In the past, he worked as Project Manager for large global retail company for more than 10 years developing projects using different Microsoft Technologies.

Hosting and administration of large databases presents many challenges. These databases require powerful hardware to operate, and thoroughly designed maintenance, HA and DR strategies to meet SLAs.

Even though data retention policies are controlled by business requirements, this session will review the following techniques and best practices that can be applied to reduce the size of the data in a database and improve performance of the system.

1. Reducing internal index fragmentation in the system
2. Implementing ROW and PAGE Data Compression
3. Compressing LOB Data on the client and/or with CLR routines
4. Detecting and removing unused and redundant indexes
5. Following best practices in Database Design and Deployment, such as enabling Instant File Initialization, disabling Auto-Shrink and choosing correct data types based on business requirements.
6. Releasing free space from the data files

Prerequisites: Knowledge of SQL Server Data Storage Architecture and underlying objects, such as Filegroups, Files, Tables, Indexes, Allocation Units, Extents, Pages

SPEAKER
Dmitri Korotkevitch is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and Microsoft Certified Master, author of Pro SQL Server Internals and other books with years of experience working with SQL Server as an Application and Database Developer, Database Administrator, and Database Architect.

Dmitri specializes in the design, development, and performance tuning of complex OLTP systems that handle thousands of transactions per second around the clock. He blogs at: http://aboutsqlserver.com.

Once you agreed to an SLA for the databases you manage its time to deliver on this promise This session will show how to select from the many HA/DR features you have in SQL Server to pick the ones that will help you meet the SLA and most important will tell you how you must combine them to be successful. For each one of the solutions we discuss we will define a series of failure modes and then check if the solution actually can fulfill the SLA as promised or if it needs more.

SPEAKER
Thomas Grohser has spent most of the past 26+ years exploring the deeper inner workings of SQL Server and its features while working for entertainment, pharmaceutical, and financial services industries. His primary focus is to architect, plan, build, and operate reliable, highly available, secure, and scalable infrastructures for SQL Server. Over the years he has managed thousands of SQL Server instances, processing trillions of rows, taking up petabytes of storage. Thomas has been a Microsoft Data Platform MVP for 9 years and has spoken regularly at conferences, SQL Saturdays, and user groups for 12 years.

On-call DBAs have all had that phone call in the middle of the night: “the database is down, fix it now!” We start scrambling to piece together various scripts to analyze the emergency, mitigate the issues, and kick off a failover or similar fix to make the database happy and healthy once again. Even scheduled maintenance likely requires us to download scripts from a ticket, run the scripts, and screenshot the results for documentation. What if I told you that Azure Data Studio’s notebooks allow you to execute T-SQL and PowerShell together to handle these processes from a single document that documents its own results and can be stored directly in source control? Join me in this demo-heavy session to see how we can handle real-world on-call situations using Azure Data Studio notebooks.

Speaker:
Matt is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and has worked with SQL Server since 2000. He is the leader of the Lexington, KY PASS local group and a frequent domestic and international community speaker. He’s an IDERA ACE alumnus and 2020 Friend of Redgate. His original data professional role was in database development, which quickly evolved into query tuning work that further evolved into being a DBA in the healthcare realm. He has supported several critical systems utilizing SQL Server and managed dozens of 24/7/365 SQL Server implementations. Following several years as a consultant, he is now the Director of Database Management for rev.io, where he is implementing data governance, DevOps, and performance improvements enterprise-wide.